“Shit.” She pushed softly against his shoulders and he let her down. The second her feet hit the ground, she wanted to run. “I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have done that. Very unprofessional.”

He rubbed the back of his neck and turned toward the ice. “It was a good goal.”

“Really good,” she said, trying to ignore the way her lips were still tingling and how that feeling had zipped all the way to her core.

“Amazing,” he said, looking everywhere but at her. “One for the highlights.”

Oh God, this wasn’t awkward at all. “Without a doubt.”

At least this road trip couldn’t get any worse.

…

Ian hadn’t stopped thinking about that kiss in two days.

Every meal when he, Christensen, and Shelby had been sequestered from the team on Lucy’s PR orders for “bonding time,” he’d talked, but he’d been wondering if she kept remembering that kiss, too. Every time they had to watch a game with an empty seat between them like a personal DMZ, he couldn’t help but curse a little extra that the team had entered a scoring drought. And now, when she was across the practice rink in Vancouver as the team practiced drills and he did a slow skate around the oval, finally cleared by the doc for that much at least, he still couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Yeah, he was watching her as she sat on the bench yakking with Christensen whenever he stopped nearby.

He had no clue what they were talking about, but it must have been funny as hell considering the size of her smile. Meanwhile, Ian was doing loops around the ice like it was couple skate and he was the lone loser out by himself.

“Ian,” Shelby hollered, waving him over.

His gut reaction was to ignore her, because God knew he’d been practicing that for the past few days. However, her shout had cut through the sounds of the skates and sticks, and every player on the team glanced over at him. Then they all stopped, their blades turning the ice to snow as they skidded to a stop. Gossipy assholes, they just wanted to see what would happen next.

Of course, if this didn’t involve him, he’d be gawking without shame, too.

There really wasn’t a way to avoid being a damn coffee klatch, always in one another’s business when you spent nine months out of the year skate-to-skate with one another.